by Nick DeRiso
Sounds of Saturn, a Fort Wayne, Ind.-based experimental trio, takes the road less travelled on Mars Via Parachute. In fact, often, they’re not on any road at all.
Instead, the record employs every trick in the noodle-rock playbook, from psychedelia and stadium-shaking riffs to thrilling science-geek constructions that include math-based tempos.
As spacy as it all is, though, Mars Via Parachute isn’t elevator music. “95 Pan-1,” the album opener, begins with an ethereal wash of synthesizers but goes no further out into the atmosphere. Guitarist James Lake and bassist Joshua Elias quickly move into a jazz-inflected groove that ebbs and flows, like a quick inhalation and then a sigh. Then, just as “95 Pan-1” slows to a glacier pace, Lake tears off a sharp, jagged riff.
On “? (Answers),” drummer Brice Densmore begins with a driving, primal beat, while a knifing keyboard creates this looming sense of ambient portent. An interesting turbulence follows when Lake slows the tempo only to see Densmore and Elias charge forward again.
The group then channels Pink Floyd on “Ants Serving Shapes,” as a dreamy interlude by Lake on slide slowly builds into this sweeping landscape of echoing wonder. Densmore’s complex percussive musings bridge the two worlds. That interplay has a jazz band’s nimble intelligence, but also boasts a flinty edge more in keeping with the art-rock movement of the 1970s.
Though that period is clearly a principal influence, Mars Via Parachute never settles into that – or any other – environ for long. The group has a shifting duality in keeping with their name, since the term “Sounds of Saturn” is associated with the intense radio emissions first discovered to be emanating from the ringed planet by the Cassini spacecraft in 2002. Saturn’s intricate spectrum of sound, called kilometric radiation, is marked by rising and falling tones – similar to the auroral radio emissions associated with our own planet’s celestial northern and southern lights.
Similarly, the initial moments of Sounds of Saturn songs are often simply foundations for lengthy meditations that move far afield of those humble beginnings. “Westerlund #1,” for instance, starts as a tweaking, Brian Eno-esque instrumental before ramping up into a byzantine rock groove straight out of Yes.
“Everything is emptiness … Everything is awake” begins like another epiphany of lazy improvisations and wow-man noodlings, only to have Sounds of Saturn rip up that template with a blast of crunchy heavy metal. (There are additional surprises ahead on this track. Densmore keeps bashing happily along, while Lake and Elias then set about creating a swirling new deliberative vibe.)
The title track plays initially like a Summer of Love curio, but band subsequently finds a new vista by redirecting “Mars Via Parachute” into the shag-carpeted improvisational rock cadence favored in the old days by the likes of Santana and pre-Steve Perry-era Journey.
Sounds of Saturn’s ability to blend both genre and structure is borne out of a shared musical empathy. They clearly are having fun together on tracks like “Pitter Patter Footsteps,” which finds Lake exploring an astral high-end on his guitar while Densmore and Elias work in circular patterns behind him. They discover a chirping nirvana midway through, and this pleasant vista allows the trio to trip happily toward the song’s ever-slowing end.
The appropriately titled “Transcendental,” which closes Mars Via Parachute, adds a ghostly archival interview with Albert Einstein, who explains his theory of relativity over a pulsing guitar. Those groundbreaking ideas on equivalence make all the more sense while listening to a band just as intrigued by form as by function. And, yeah, it’s the kind of thing only a hipster doofus would love, just one more fun nerdy addition.
Then Lake heads off into a scorching album-ending guitar solo, blasting Sounds of Saturn back out into the ether.
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